XBRL US has issued an invitation to investors, creators and other users
of mutual fund and other investment company information to review and
comment on the draft dictionaries of financial and business terms
(taxonomy) for the risk/return section of mutual fund prospectuses and
the schedule of investments. The national consortium for XML standards
for business and financial information reporting has completed the set
of data elements which will be used to put key mutual fund information
contained in the risk/return summary section of the prospectus, as well
as investment company portfolio holdings information, in structured data
format. XML-based data tags will make mutual fund and investment company
data more useable, searchable and extractable, resulting in a higher
level of accountability from mutual funds and other investment management
companies and better quality reporting, so that investors are better
able to make informed and responsible decisions with confidence. The
risk/return summary contains key information about a fund's investment
objectives and strategies, costs, risks, and past performance. Mutual
funds and other investment companies are required to disclose their
portfolio holdings in their schedule of investments as part of their
financial statements. XBRL formatting of this content may make mutual
fund disclosure more accurate and improve accessibility for investors
and others. All users and creators of investment company information
are encouraged to download the full taxonomy or review it in an XBRL
Review Tool that allows visitors to provide comments on the individual
elements. Comments received will be reviewed and potentially incorporated
into the final taxonomy that is likely to be used in mutual fund filing
starting in 2009. The comment period will close on November 24, 2008.

The Semantic Web envisioned by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila in
2001 was a grandiose vision that involved the use of agents to book
doctor appointments and to find the best driving routes with the least
hassle. The envisaged system was built upon formal ontologies that had
already achieved a large following of scientists and agent developers.
The key technology behind the Semantic Web is the Resource Description
Framework (RDF), which can be seen as both a graphical (a graph of
n-triples) and an object-oriented knowledge representational model.
Several formats exist to make this model a machine-readable model
(for instance RDF/XML, RDF/N3, and RDF/Turtle). Although the Semantic
Web visionaries raised some important issues and put forward interesting
connections between technologies, they missed one thing: the fact that
the Web had turned into a web of documents. Therefore, a middle way
needed to occur between the formalism of ontologies and the informalism
of documents. This is known as Linked Data. Linked Data coupled with
agent technology is an ideal way of dealing with Semantic Web data.
This article provides an overview of the Interlinked Semantic Web,
agent technologies, and an example of the two combined. There are four
generic types of reactive agents that are traditionally discussed in
texts: (1) Simple reflex agents, which act based on their current
perceptions; (2) Model-based reflex agents, which act based on their
current perceptions and partial histories; (3) Goal-based agents,
which use their current perceptions in addition to their desires (goals)
to act; (4) Utility-based agents, which try to maximize their status
to achieve higher efficiency of acting... All agents have specific
behaviors. A scheduler agent, which could be seen as an implementation
of a Model-based reactive agent, takes time into consideration when
executing those behaviors. There are many different types of scheduler
behaviors. A simple example is the waker behavior, which runs after a
particular time-out period. Another simple example is a ticker behavior,
which executes once every set period. A searcher agent is a kind of
information agent that has one particular role, which is to find one
or more items in a set. It can be formally implemented as a goal-based
or utility-based agent. A Web spider, which is just one kind of
searcher agent, searches the Web to pre-index pages that are ready
for users to search. Searcher agents, which are spawned with specific
initial goals from builder agents, are also employed in the PubMed
system, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that
includes over 18 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science
journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. Text-based searcher
agents usually have some kind of natural language processing built in
and, in some cases, latent semantic indexing... The Semantic Web in
Linked Data format is a perfect way to represent knowledge on the Web
because the object-oriented model is simple to understand. Agent
technology is the perfect way to model an autonomous process because
of its ability to become an artificial society based on real-life
society. This article demonstrates the beginnings of a simple project
that could be taken further in several different ways, including closer
modeling of a real-life user agent, more artificial intelligence,
extensive use of formal ontologies, expanding the Linked Data sets
beyond DBpedia, making it a multi-agent system, and translating an
entirely free-text question into a SPARQL query.

Microsoft has introduced an installer that streamlines installations
of free components from its Web application platform, and another to
guide its customers in the installation of popular .NET and PHP
open-source applications that are compatible with Windows. The company
released a beta version of Web App Installer (Web AI). Web AI is a
download manager that handles the acquisition and configuration of
open-source applications that run in both cloud and hosted environments.
According to Lauren Cooney, group product manager for Web platform and
standards at Microsoft, applications span four solution areas: content
management, eCommerce, digital marketing, and personal and social
websites. Some of the packaged applications are DotNetNuke, Graffiti,
PHPBB, and WordPress... Developers can use Microsoft tools and platforms
to create open-source applications. Web Platform Installer (Web PI),
is a download manager used to install Microsoft's developer technologies
for building Web applications. Web PI, which was released in early
October 2008, determines what components need to be installed together.
It then installs products from the Microsoft website, such as .NET
Framework 3.5, IIS, Silverlight, SQL Server Express and more, Cooney
said. The installers are the result of a think session Microsoft held
three months ago to determine how it should serve Web developers and
what is important to them. Microsoft will be promoting the installers
at upcoming trade shows, including Professional Developers Conference
and DevConnections. From the web site overview: "The Web Application
Installer Beta is designed to help get you up and running with the most
widely used Web Applications freely available for your Windows Server.
Web AI provides support for popular ASP.Net and PHP Web applications
including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce and more.
With just a few simple clicks, Web AI will check your machine for the
necessary pre-requisites, download these applications from their source
location in the community, walk you through basic configuration items
and then install them on your computer."

W3C's Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published an updated
Working Draft for the "Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces"
specification. The main difference from the previous draft is the
addition of the rules and guidelines which will allow modality experts
to describe the features, capabilities and APIs for specific modality
components in sufficient detail so that the components will be
interoperable in implementations of the Multimodal Architecture. The
modality components themselves will be defined by modality experts
according to the guidelines. For example, voice modality components
might be defined by the W3C Voice Browser Working Group. The
specification describes a loosely coupled architecture for multimodal
user interfaces, which allows for co-resident and distributed
implementations, and focuses on the role of markup and scripting, and
the use of well defined interfaces between its constituents. The aim
of this design is to provide a general and flexible framework providing
interoperability among modality-specific components from different
vendors—for example, speech recognition from one vendor and
handwriting recognition from another. This framework places very few
restrictions on the individual components or on their interactions
with each other, but instead focuses on providing a general means for
allowing them to communicate with each other, plus basic infrastructure
for application control and platform services... In discussing the
design of MMI systems, it is important to keep in mind the distinction
between the design-time view (i.e., the markup) and the run-time view
(the software that executes the markup). At the design level, we assume
that multimodal applications will take the form of multiple documents
from different namespaces. In many cases, the different namespaces and
markup languages will correspond to different modalities, but we do not
require this. A single language may cover multiple modalities and there
may be multiple languages for a single modality. At runtime, the MMI
architecture features loosely coupled software constituents that may
be either co-resident on a device or distributed across a network. In
keeping with the loosely-coupled nature of the architecture, the
constituents do not share context and communicate only by exchanging
events.

Three of the major identity and access management vendors—Oracle,
Novell and Sun Microsystems—put a new horse in the race for control
of the security space. In the case of Oracle, the emphasis was on
mitigating insider fraud and protecting business applications against
phishing, Trojans and other Web-based threats. In Oracle Adaptive
Access Manager 10g R3, the company built in context-aware capabilities
to fight fraud. Also included is an autolearning feature that security
administrators can use to detect fraud patterns and usage anomalies.
In addition, Oracle added reporting tools that integrate with Oracle
Business Intelligence Publisher and enhanced forensic capabilities.
Meanwhile, Sun released its Identity Compliance Manager with a focus
on enforcing segregation of duties and access certification—measures
meant to help businesses meet regulatory and industry compliance
mandates. Sun also added a number of compliance dashboards and reports
to provide executives with relevant information to ensure that the
proper controls are in place to meet compliance regulations. In the
past six months, Sun has updated its entire identity management
portfolio, offering a complete identity management solution that
provides open access, open source and open standards. Sun's identity
management suite includes the following products: Sun Role Manager,
Sun Compliance Manager, Sun Identity Manager and Sun OpenSSO Enterprise...
Novell introduced the Novell Access Governance Suite to augment its
existing compliance management portfolio. The suite consists of two
products, Novell Roles Lifecycle Manager and Novell Compliance
Certification Manager. Aimed at bridging the gap between security
mandates and unique business requirements, both products are based
on an OEM relationship between Novell and identity and access management
vendor Aveska. Access data is collected and normalized, Novell officials
said, and there is full automation for access review, certification
and reporting as well as access change management and access rights
remediation.

The World Wide Web Consortium announced that it is holding its annual
Technical Plenary week near its European host site in Mandelieu, France.
More than 350 software engineers, developers, and other experts in a
wide range of technologies such as HTML, XML, CSS, Mobile Web, Semantic
Web, and Video in the Web, come together to address a variety of
challenges in the development of Web standards. Through joint meetings,
panels, and "hallway discussions," participants build shared understanding
of these challenges, an important step in the design of standards that
ensure that the Web remains open, interoperable, and accessible for all
people. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web, will
open the 22-October-2008 plenary session with a keynote and discussion
on the technical direction of W3C for the next several years and where
Web applications, documents, and data come together. In the keynote,
Berners-Lee will also share thoughts on the future of HTML in the browser
and how HTML and XML communities can learn from each other. Technical
experts from W3C staff and W3C Members organizations such as CWI, DERI
Galway, Fundacion CTIC, Google, IBM, INRIA, IWA-HWG, Mark Logic,
Mobileaware, NICTA, OMTP, Openstream, Opera Software, Oracle, TopQuadrant,
University of Amsterdam, University of Edinburgh, and Vodafone, will
deliver a wide range of talks and demonstrations as part of a diverse
agenda that includes: (1) the architecture of the Web; (2) a demonstration
on building Accessible Rich Internet Applications; (3) the impact of
content management systems on the Web; (4) demonstrations of multimodal
interaction, voice browsing, and Semantic Web technology. The meeting
record of the Plenary Day sessions will be public, and attendees are
encouraged to blog in real time.

From Pierre Vignera (BPM Team, Bull R&D): "Looking at recent articles
and various BPM solutions, it would be easy to assume that BPEL is now
the defacto standard to be used when implementing a workflow engine.
From a technical perspective this may well be correct, however few
people will claim that BPEL can be easily understood by the end-user,
a.k.a the business analyst, who definitely prefers a graph based
notation such as BPMN. This article will provide guidance in
understanding the discrepancy between the technical point of view
(pro-BPEL) and analyst's (pro-BPMN). Going further, even if most
BPEL-based BPM solutions agree on the discrepancy (since they usually
provide a BPMN to BPEL mapping) this article will explain why it is
not currently the solution to BPM problems. A real-world example will
be used to illustrate our arguments... Developers and BPM users may
believe that BPEL is a structured language since it is basically based
on blocks, much as traditional languages such as Java and C amongst
others. This comes in part from its origin: Microsoft's XLANG, which
was block based. However, BPEL origins also include IBM's WSFL, and
this is of great importance for the following discussion as it was
graph based (hence unstructured). We find in BPEL a mix of structuredness
(blocks) and unstructuredness (control-links and events). Those last
constructs introduce a bit of unstructuredness into a world of
structuredness... The conclusion is that BPEL is not a structured
languages even if it looks like a structured language. On the other
hand, BPMN is a flow-chart notation which is naturally unstructured.
No doubt about this. In chapter 11 (page 137) of the BPMN specification,
a direct mapping from BPMN to BPEL is provided. Some BPMN editors
(and users) believe that BPMN is a simple GUI for the underlying BPEL
language. This is not quite true... In some ways, BPEL is much closer
to a standard language such as Java than to a natural workflow notation
such as BPMN (which is graph-based). Until now, programmers have dealt
directly with their language. Integrated Development Environments are
used to simplify several recurrent steps such as compiling, refactoring,
testing and so on. But programmers speak their language directly. We
claim that it should be the same with BPEL. An IDE can only simplify
programming (note that we don't use the term 'designing' here). But
BPEL programmers will have to speak BPEL in order to use it and make
something useful out of it..."

"I'm at Yahoo for the OpenID/OAuth UX Summit. The room is packed with
40 or so folks. Companies with representation include Yahoo, Google,
Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, AOL, SixApart, JanRain, Vidoop,
Chi.mp, and Magnolia, and projects including Internet2 and DiSo. The
Summit is a response to recent usability studies by Yahoo and Google
that show the current state-of-affairs with OpenID and OAuth is quite
poor, and we need together to find a user experience for the 'open
stack' that works for consumers... Next up: Max Engel of MySpace.
'The Hybrid Login: OpenID and OAuth.' MySpace will support OpenID,
OAuth, and a hybrid of the two. Will use a pop-up iframe. Allows the
user to stay in context. Max is showing screens of the experience
they are planning. Every MySpace user has a vanity URL, which will be
their OpenID. Still trying to figure out whether to support logging
with just 'MySpace.com'. Key design elements will be similar to
Facebook Connect. Data types: content, address book, registration,
profile, friends, activity. Big laugh as Max shows the original OAuth
screen, that has so much fine print that it looks like it was designed
by a lawyer! Lots of discussion about whether email address should be
passed to the site. Why it matters: not just for communicating, but
also to avoid duplicate account problem Plaxo has experienced as an
OpenID Relying Party and Yahoo OpenID. Chris Messina advancing the
idea of email address as OpenID, something under consideration for
OpenID 2.1. Max revisiting that MySpace Data Availability originally
was to have zero cacheability of the data, which was not going to
fly with anyone. Now planning a 'portable profile' plus some cacheable
MySpace-specific data. Allen Tom of Yahoo raises the point that the
'cacheable' data is all on public pages already, so why not just
mark it up with microformats and remove the caching restriction...
Now, Eric Sachs of Google, who just showed what I think is the first
public demo of Google as an OpenID Provider. Giving context: SaaS
vendors get asked to be a SAML RP for enterprise IDPs. In parallel,
Google Checkout folks had questions/issues with login. Giving examples
of login on Buy.com and Amazon.com, as an inspiration for a new/better?
login experience for OpenID/OAuth. Now the challenge of desktop apps
and OAuth. Seems like 'No, help me sign in' is the key verbiage of
this new 'LSO' login model Eric is advocating. Now Google Accounts
vs. accounts for Google AppsForYourDomain..."